The Coordination of the Ethereum Ecosystem: Balancing Decentralization and Collaboration

In the Ethereum ecosystem, a major social challenge is finding the balance between decentralization and collaboration. The strength of this ecosystem lies in its diversity, which includes various participants such as client teams, researchers, layer two network teams, application developers, and local community organizations, all working towards their ideal vision of the future of Ethereum. However, the key challenge is ensuring that these different projects can collaboratively build a seemingly unified Ethereum ecosystem, rather than becoming incompatible fragmented kingdoms.

In response to this challenge, the concept of "Ethereum Coherence" has been proposed within the ecosystem. This involves coordination across multiple levels, including values, technology, and economy. However, due to the vague definition of this concept, it may pose risks of social control. If coherence merely means aligning with specific groups, then the concept loses its original meaning.

To better understand and implement coordination, we need to specify it and break it down into measurable attributes. Although everyone's standards may vary and change over time, we already have some reliable starting points:

1. Open Source: This not only ensures the verifiability of the code but, more importantly, reduces the risk of technological lock-in, allowing third parties to make unobstructed improvements. The core infrastructure components of the ecosystem should especially remain open source.

2. Open Standards: Committed to achieving interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem, building on existing and developing open standards. If existing standards do not meet the needs, new standards should be developed in collaboration with the community.

3. Decentralization and Security: Minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure to reduce the risks of censorship and single points of failure. Evaluation can be conducted through methods such as "retreat testing" and "internal attack testing."

4. Inclusiveness: The success of the project should benefit the entire Ethereum community, even if they do not directly participate in the project. This can be achieved by using ETH as the token, contributing open-source technology, and other means.

5. Contribution to a Wider World: Ethereum aims to promote freedom and openness, innovate ownership and collaboration models, and provide solutions to the significant challenges faced by humanity. Projects should consider how to contribute in these areas.

These standards do not apply to all projects; different types of projects will have different measurement criteria. Over time, the priority of these standards may also change. For example, the rollup technology status that was acceptable two years ago may no longer be sufficient today.

Ideally, we hope to see more entities like L2beat emerging, tracking the performance of various projects in meeting these standards. In this way, competition between projects will no longer be a simple social game, but a pursuit of higher consistency under clear and understandable standards.

The Ethereum Foundation should maintain a certain distance from these evaluation activities, providing funding support but not directly participating in the evaluation process. Creating new evaluation platforms should be a permissionless process.

This approach not only provides clearer guidance for the Ethereum Foundation but also for other organizations and individuals interested in supporting the ecosystem. Each entity can make judgments based on the criteria they value most and select projects that align with these criteria. In this way, the entire community can become a force for maintaining consistency in projects.

Only after clarifying the definition of "capability" can we truly establish a strength-based system. Regarding the question of "who supervises the supervisors," the best solution is not to expect all influential people to be flawless, but to achieve this through verified mechanisms such as the separation of powers. Ecosystem monitors like L2beat and blockchain explorers are good practices of this principle in the current Ethereum ecosystem.

By further clarifying the various aspects of coordination, while avoiding the concentration of all power in a single "supervisor", we can make this concept more effective and realize it in a fair and inclusive manner that aligns with the pursuits of the Ethereum ecosystem.